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It’s been an exciting week for transsexuals-in-the-news. First, Largo, Florida, City Manager Steve Staunton, was fired by city commissioners on February 28th after he’d been outed by the St. Petersburg Times. Local minister Ron Sanders noted, “If Jesus were here tonight, I assure you he’d want him terminated.”

Then, on Thursday, March 1st, Gray’s Anatomy viewers were able to view the repeat of an episode in which the docs perform sex-change surgery on a patient whose hormone regimen has apparently given her breast cancer (viewers might be forgiven for not knowing that there is no casual link between transsexuality and breast cancer).

But the big news on the trans front is the appearance of seven real transgender individuals on All My Children, on an episode slated to air Friday March 9th.

Transgender people are no strangers to television, of course; there was a time when no sweeps period was complete without us, telling stories of sponge cake and heartbreak and nine-inch nails. Certain television shows seemed to go out of their way to find trans people who were most unstable, or who had been convinced to go in front of the cameras at the moment in their lives of their greatest vulnerability. For years it seemed as if we were the one minority group that everyone was free to bash; there were almost no positive representations of us in the media, ever.

But a funny thing happened over the last five years. HBO aired the generally well-regarded documentary “Normal” in 2003; a few years later Felicity Huffman was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of a transwoman in “Transamerica.” As the author of the memoir She’s Not There: a Life in Two Genders, I found myself on the set of the Oprah Winfrey Show on three occasions, and on Larry King twice. Both times I was treated with respect by the hosts, and I left the sets feeling optimistic about prospects for future representation of transpeople in the media.

And yet, for every show that gets it right, there seems to be another one still determined to depict trans peoples lives as marginal, or lurid, or bizarre. I didn’t see the Gray’s Anatomy episode, but plenty of friends had emailed me in its wake. One trans woman wrote me, “It sucked. Full of errors. It was offensive.”

In other words, the usual.

Part of the reason trans issues are so complex—and so difficult to present well in the media—is that there are so many different ways of being transgender. Even among TS individuals, there is wide dissent about what the condition means, or what the issues are, or what the discourse should be. Transgender, as an umbrella term, might well include everyone from transsexuals (both male-to-female/MtF and female-to-male/FtM), drag queens, heterosexual crossdressers, “genderqueer” activists, and everyone in between. The term also surely includes a large number of gender-variant individuals who aren’t interested in a name for the thing they have or feel, but who have to deal with it nonetheless.

All of which brings us to All My Children. When I was first approached about appearing on the show, my hackles went up; surely, I thought, a soap opera was the last place trans people could expect their diverse stories to be presented with subtlety or complexity.

I was wrong. Apparently for a few months now AMC has been following the transition of one of its characters, “Zarf” (played by the brilliant Jeffrey Carlson). When Carlson was first asked to play the part of Zarf, as he morphed into Zoe, he agreed upon the condition that the writers “do it right.”

“Doing it right” meant bringing in GLADD, and consulting with their trans spokeswoman, Andy Marra, on presenting the transition accurately.

The result? Now, several months into Zoe’s transformation, she has become one of the most beloved characters on the show; the middle-American audience of AMC has come to truly root for Zoe as she deals with her complicated journey.

In February, the writers got the idea to have Zoe attend a support group at the Pine Valley Hospital, and to have real trans people play themselves. The plan was to have us tell our own stories as the cameras rolled, and to then edit that material down for use on the March 9 show.

The people they found for the group included at least three moderately well known trans people—there was Andy Marra from GLADD; Betty Crow, known as the subject of Helen Boyd’s well-regarded books, My Husband Betty, and the newly published She’s Not the Man I Married, and me. There were four other folks I did not know—David Harrison, a trans man who’s been performing in his own show for years; Brigit, a shy Latina woman who has devoted most of her life to caring for her invalid mother; June, a dynamic young woman, who lit up the room like a firecracker, and Tommy, a dignified, very cool young trans man. (See GLADD’s news release for a group picture, and click here for a Q&A between GLADD and myself.)

We were young and old: FTMs and MTFs; African-American; Latina, Asian and white. Some of us were post-op, some pre, some were non-op, some weren’t sure.

Surely, I thought, if we could pull this off, we’d get a wide range of different trans identities onto the airwaves.

The question remained, though: could we pull it off?

***

In the last week of February, my family flew down to New York from Maine—the taping conveniently falling during school vacation for us. As my partner Grace took our sons off to the Toys R Us in Times Square, I headed toward the ABC studios on West 66th Street. A short time later, I found myself surrounded by directors and producers and actors and thirty huge, burly members of the Stage Hands Union, and suddenly realized something that would have been self-evident to anyone else from the beginning.

Namely, playing yourself is harder than it sounds.

After a short rehearsal, we were all shepherded into the makeup room and a woman gave me what she called “the soap opera bump,” which involved teasing my hair at the crown and showering me with hair spray.

“Oh,” said one of the actresses, entering the room. “You’re giving Jenny Boylan the bump.”

As I lay there, getting bumped, my heart was pounding, and it occurred to me once again that it was more than possible I was about to make a national fool of myself. For one thing, I’m no actor; I’m an English professor, and the part of “group leader” might have been better cast by David or Betty, who’d both been professional actors.

As we sat there in the makeup room, the various cast members in the support group and I began to have a conversation—about the struggles we’d faced, about what it meant to us to be trans, about what we hoped the future would hold. It was a wild conversation, and well before it was over, each of us was thinking the same thing, namely: they should be filming this!

Somehow, that conversation psyched me up for the taping, and so by the time we actually went back to the set, I felt strangely calm. Jenny, I thought. Just pretend it’s a class you’re teaching, and it’ll be fine.

The director yelled, “Action,” and we began our scene.
***

So what stories did we tell, as the cameras rolled? Betty Crow spoke with passion and eloquence about the importance of her wife, Helen Boyd, in her life, and that her number one priority, even as she moves into transition—(she is reticent to call it that)—is staying married.

June talked about self-empowerment, about the importance of staying positive. Unlike many of us, she’d never really “hid” her trans identity, so that coming out, for her, was less dramatic than for some of the others. Later, we talked about whether this is a more typical scenario for African-Americans (I’d heard this insight from other trans people of color on other occasions). The theory being: perhaps those who are already in a position of opposition to American culture feel that they have less to lose by embracing a trans identity.

For a while I thought Tommy, one of the FTMs, wasn’t going to say a word; he just slouched, all surly, in his chair. Then, when I asked him about his own experiences, he leaned forward and spoke eloquently and articulately about his experiences, particularly those pertaining to Asian Americans.

Andy Marra, from GLADD, also spoke about her experiences as an Asian trans person, and recalled a terrible occasion when she’d been the victim of violence. What was the reason she’d been singled out, she wondered? Was it because she was Asian? Was it because she was trans? Was it because she was female? A combination of all three?

David Harrison talked about his changing sexual orientation. As a woman, David had been exclusively lesbian; now, as a man, he finds himself attracted primarily to men. We talked about the differences between sexual orientation and gender identity, about the ways these separate issues occasionally blur together.

Brigit, the Latina woman, spoke quietly about caring for her mother, year after year, and what it was like when her mother finally came to understand her. She said something like, “I never really did anything with my life; mostly I stayed home and looked out for mom.”

The rest of replied that by caring for her mother, she’d done plenty.

Then, with tears in her eyes, Bridgit spoke of her mother. “Well,” she said. “She always wanted a girl.”

I tried to talk about the ways in which everyone has dragons to slay in life, and that in the journey to find the courage to become our selves, trans people are pretty similar to everyone else. In the end, I said, what makes us different is a whole lot less important than what we all have in common.

What did we NOT talk about, you might ask? Well, surgery for one. While surgery can play a major role in a trans person’s life, it is surely not the thing that defines us. And yet it is the single thing that the media is most obsessed with. When I appeared on one cable news show several years ago, they’d flashed on the screen beneath my name: JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN: HAD SEX CHANGE OPERATION. It is maddening and discouraging, the media’s obsession with surgery. It’s as if they did a story about a Jewish person and the only thing they wanted to talk about was the bris.

And so it was a great relief to hear a group of trans people on television in which the niceties of surgery were never mentioned, once.

We also spent exactly zero time talking about our hair and nails, or trading makeup tips. Nobody said a word about heels or Spandex.

No one put us on the defensive, or called upon us to explain ourselves. No one questioned our faith, or suggested we were all going to hell. No one called us selfish, or freaks, or, my favorite, “abominations.”

If anyone called us anything, it was human.

Over the years, I’ve done lots of television, and after I appear on a show, I often think: “Well, parts of that were good, parts off that were mortifying, but at least we’ll sell some books, and anybody who buys a book will get the story the way I want them to.”

At the end of the All My Children gig, I thought, “Well, I won’t sell any books out of that at all. But outside of Oprah, that might be the best thing on TV I’ve ever been involved in.”

***
At the end of the day, we were all treated to a lovely cast party on Central Park West, where agents and publicists and reporters from Access Hollywood were sipping Cosmos out of martini glasses and a nice man with huge tattoos walked around serving us chicken sate on a stick.

At midnight, I weaved through the streets of New York on the arm of Jeffrey Carlson. As we walked happily down Amsterdam Avenue, we sang a song from “The Music Man.”

There were bells,in the hills, but I never heard them ringing. No I never heard them at all, Till There Was You.

I headed into the elevator of my hotel, my head still spinning.

A couple joined me in our journey Up, and they looked over at me as I stood there, smiling and humming.

Who was this oddly contented middle aged woman? They wondered. What strange turn of fate had brought her here?

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